EIGHTY years ago this month, Warner Bros. was a struggling, family-owned business on the verge of bankruptcy when it decided to gamble its future on sound movies. Tuesday, the same studio releases a three-disc edition of “The Jazz Singer,” the pioneering talkie that established Warners as a major Hollywood force.

Starring Al Jolson as a young man who defies his father, a Jewish cantor, to become an entertainer, “The Jazz Singer” is a mostly silent drama. The film comes to spectacular life during 20 minutes of sound in the legendary entertainer’s musical numbers.

Jolson’s real life inspired the Broadway play on which”The Jazz Singer” was based, but he wasn’t the Warners first, or even second, choice for the role. They first offered it to vaudeville comic George Jessel, who demanded an extra $10,000 to sing on film. The Warners responded by approaching Eddie Cantor, who suggested Jolson, a bigger star than either him or Jessel.

The new DVD set includes a feature-length documentary on the 30-year struggle to produce commercially viable sound movies, which began with Thomas Edison before the turn of the 20th century. The Vitaphone sound system Warner Bros. used for “The Jazz Singer” recorded sound on discs synchronized with the projector. It was replaced within five years by technology that recorded sound on the edge of the film. A variant is still used today.

There are also more than four hours of rare 1926 Vitaphone shorts the Warners produced at their Brooklyn studios, featuring vaudeville legends like George Burns and Gracie Allen, Joe Weber and Lew Fields, and Blossom Seeley and Benny Fields.

The first shorts (many rediscovered in recent years) were supervised by Sam Warner, who fought with his siblings to keep Jolson’s ad-libs in “The Jazz Singer” and added a few lines of scripted dialogue. There is only about two minutes of talking in the entire film, but its success ended the silent-film era within two years.

Sam Warner tragically died just one day before the film’s premiere at the old Warner Theatre on Broadway. On the night of their biggest triumph, the Warners were headed to Los Angeles for the funeral. The DVD includes a reproduction of a poignant telegram to Jack Warner: “WHEN YOU LOST ONE BROTHER YOU FOUND ANOTHER ONE. YOUR LOVING BROTHER, AL JOLSON.”